Saturday 17 August 2013 15.02 EDT
First published on Saturday 17 August 2013 15.02 EDT

A slice of social history was served up on BBC1 in the modern style – with full celebrity trimmings. The programme was called Paul O'Grady's Working Britain and its name was the subject of some controversy. The bit that was problematic was "Working Britain". Originally, it was intended to be "Working Class", but according to reports, the BBC pooh-poohed the word "class", presumably for its unfashionable connotations.

What is striking is that in a documentary made in collaboration with the Open University, the "Paul O'Grady" part of the title was never in question. Nowadays, the attachment of a celebrity name to the finished product seems to be the most reliable means of getting factual films made. O'Grady has form in this regard, previously fronting Paul O'Grady's Orient and Paul O'Grady's America, a formula that suggests not so much subjectivity as discovery, as if working Britain, the Orient and America had been waiting for O'Grady's confirmation of their existence.

The irony is that O'Grady owes his fame to another name, that of his creation-in-drag, Lily Savage. A blunt-talking, shoplifting, sometime prostitute and single mother, Savage was one of the more unlikely stars of the 1990s. Such was "her" success that O'Grady didn't appear as himself until 2000, since when he has written and published a bestselling trilogy of autobiographies. The first, At My Mother's Knee … and other low joints, gained critical praise for its earthy but fond portrayal of a working-class childhood in Liverpool.

A millionaire several times over, who lives in a large house on a generous plot of land in the Kent countryside, O'Grady still considers himself to be working class, a point he emphasised several times in the first section of his two-part film. His insistence raises a couple of intriguing questions. Was it his background that was deemed the necessary qualification to make the film? Or was it his continuing identification, despite his radically changed material circumstances, with his humble roots?

These are not idle speculations, because the resulting film was an unstructured mishmash of sentimental memories, saccharine cliches and oddly unsupported opinion. Certainly, the two academics involved in research were sufficiently disappointed with the outcome to ask that their names be removed from the credits.

O'Grady waxed nostalgic about the miners, because they did a tough job in backbreaking conditions, but could scarcely conceal his condescension towards young call-centre workers in bright, comfortable offices who failed to see themselves as working class. The staggering presumption of a multimillionaire romanticising the community-strengthening harshness of mining while trying to instil a sense of class consciousness in a group of modestly paid but apparently contented office workers seemed lost on O'Grady.

But that may be because, in much the same way that his audience really did believe in Savage, so O'Grady really does see himself as truly working class. In the documentary, he spoke of his childhood in Birkenhead as a time and place where elders and the police were respected and everyone looked out for each other. That's a generous statement for a gay man. For while Merseyside may have been many things in the 1960s and 70s, it could not be described as the frontline of gay liberation or pride. O'Grady has said that he never told his beloved mother, who worked in a soap factory, that he was gay, although he has also said that he thought she knew.

Not that O'Grady's sexuality was clear cut. When he was 17, he conceived a child with an older woman with whom he had a casual affair. In the same week that he learned of his impending fatherhood, both of his parents suffered heart attacks – and his father died. He had already left school by then and had joined the civil service. "I'd wanted to work for the Ministry of Defence," he later recalled, "because I had some far-fetched idea that it had something to do with The Avengers, but I ended up in social security."

He played little or no part in the upbringing of his daughter, Sharyn, although he paid child support, but he has, by all accounts, maintained a close relationship. He left the civil service after a dispute and took up a series of odd jobs, before settling in London, where he worked as a social worker for Camden council. It was an experience that deepened his appreciation of the misfortune of those at the bottom of the social ladder.

"If a single mother had to go to hospital, I'd move in and look after her kids so they didn't have to go into care," he once said. "Often, there'd be a drunken father turning up at 2am, wanting to know who I was, and I'd say mincing slightly, 'I'm from Camden council!' and he'd smack me. So I'd be going around with a black eye and nits from the kids and scabies."

He has cited this period as part inspiration, along with his Birkenhead female relations, for Savage. He has spoken of her as a kind of avenging angel, giving voice to the anger that he was unable to express. During his social worker years, he also moonlighted as a barman at the Vauxhall Tavern, a renowned gay pub in south London, and it was here that he first got up on stage and Lily Savage was born. By the mid-90s, Savage was a phenomenon, appearing variously on BBC, ITV and Channel 4. But the workload and its accompanying stress soon took its toll. He suffered two major heart attacks, the first in 2002 and the second in 2006. His one-time partner and long-term manager and friend, Brendan Murphy, died from brain cancer in 2005.

The comedian has made light of his difficulties and personal tragedies, once noting: "Somebody called me the Edith Piaf of daytime TV, which I loved. Drama after drama."

His career continued to flourish, but it was perhaps a sign that his peak of popularity was behind him when ITV ended his Paul O'Grady Live Friday night chatshow. Whether or not it was a ratings decision, there was a sense in which he seemed to lose his enthusiasm for the celebrity carousel, complaining that interviewing A-listers was "a nightmare".

He has subsequently focused on his pet projects, namely For the Love of Dogs, in which he follows dogs after they leave the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, and The British Animal Honours. He also has a show on Radio 2 in which he gives listeners the full O'Grady treatment, all scouse wisdom and dry wisecracks.

Before leaving his chatshow, however, he did manage to cause a political stir. On one occasion, he called the coalition government "bastards" for its policy of cuts, suggesting that the Tories would have "laughed in Bambi when his mother got shot". And on another he supported the student protesters who occupied the Conservative party headquarters at Millbank Tower. Again, on the face of it, his brand of playing-to-the-gallery radicalism may have seemed well-suited to the task of addressing the issue of Britain's increasingly invisible or neglected working class. But in the event, it was apparent that for all his mouthy stances, O'Grady had little original or pertinent to say.

Last week, he never began to get to grips with differences between class and identity. Nor did he seem to understand the changing nature of work in a largely post-industrial society. For him, the end of the miners' strike in 1985 amounted "to the beginning of the end of the working classes".

This was political and historical analysis at its most simplistic and the viewer could only marvel at the way in which the Open University had been co-opted into such celebrity self-indulgence. All that seemed to matter to O'Grady was to preserve a myth of a working-class golden era. And while there's little doubt that the working class once enjoyed a much better press than it receives nowadays, the fact is that the golden era that O'Grady constantly harked backed to was mostly one of poverty and hardship.

That the days of tin baths, outside lavatories and long hours down the pit have passed is not something to be lamented, particularly by an extremely wealthy Kent landowner. O'Grady's heart might be in the right place, but his mind was lost in a treacle of misplaced sentimentality.